The common person does know what he wants: to improve his condition in life according to his own preferences. And he succeeds so well in his private life that, once he was left individually free, he and his fellows generated an Industrial Revolution and what economist Deirdre McCloskey calls the “Great Enrichment.”
Except in the special case of children, we must presume that the individual is best positioned to know what he wants, what tradeoffs he’s willing to make to get it, and the necessary contracts and other arrangements he should conclude with his fellow humans. He can make errors, of course, but he is the one who has the strongest incentives to avoid them and correct them. He can turn to relatives and friends for advice or ask experts. Brand names and commercial reputations help him choose complex goods and services such as cars, computers, and life insurance. In case of doubt, he can follow the rules that successful people follow. In any event, the common person is likely to make fewer errors in his life than would a benevolent master, not to mention a non-benevolent one.
Confused mix / It is when the common person is given the power to decide what his fellow humans should want that things can go very wrong. History and economic theory show the consequences of the domination and exploitation of some individuals by others. Liberal democracy was conceived as a political regime to avoid this danger. Unfortunately, worldly democracies are imperfectly liberal and frequently go astray.
One individual deciding what his fellow citizens should want and coercively imposing it on them is a dictator. A small group of individuals in that role is an oligarchy. When 50 percent plus 1 of the voters believe they know what they or everyone collectively wants and have the general power to impose it on everybody, we have what Alexis de Tocqueville called a “tyranny of the majority” or Bertrand de Jouvenel called a “totalitarian democracy.”
A collective such as an electorate literally does not know and cannot know what it wants; only the individuals who comprise it know what they individually want. Collective decisions reached by voting are subject to incoherence (also called “cycling,” like from one election to another). For example, the electorate could choose A (say, standard Democrats) over B (standard Republicans), B over C (a populist strongman), but then C over A. This intransitivity in collective choices can happen even if each voter’s preferences are transitive (coherent) and don’t change. Because a collective can want something and its contrary, what the electorate wants is not clear at all. (See “Populist Choices Are Meaningless,” Spring 2021.)
The electoral choices presented to voters are typically a confused mix of unreliable promises and obscure policies. Contrast that with the clarity and variety of market choices. Market buyers directly get what they want, while most voters have to choose what they think is the least bad alternative.
Rational ignorance / These problems are compounded by what economists call voters’ “rational ignorance.” When an individual buys, say, a microwave, he is the one who determines what is purchased, he pays all the cost, and he gets all the benefits. So, he will endeavor to choose the model that maximizes his net benefit: he reads Consumer Reports or googles similar sources, consults friends, and shops around.
It’s different when he votes. The probability that his vote will decide the election and thus give him what he wants is infinitesimal; for all practical purposes, he has no voice in the choice made by the majority. Whether or not he incurs the costs of making an enlightened choice (costs include his time reading political platforms, government documents, economic studies, different editorials, etc.) will not change the net benefit he gets from the others who determine the election result. He will thus remain “rationally ignorant” of the issues and vote according to his intuitions or by following the political tribe he roots for.
The economist Joseph Schumpeter put it in different terms:
The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his own interests.
Moreover, well-organized special interests will typically take advantage of this situation and capture the government and put it at their service. Expect trade unions or billionaires or inefficient corporations or some other special interests to get what they want from the government.
To all these topics, public choice economics has made major contributions since the mid-20th century. When the common people elect a strong leader or would-be master, Mencken’s aphorism seems to take all its force.
A better future? / Yet, there are caveats. Do we really want the majority of voters to get their collective choice “good and hard,” let alone those who voted against it? The politicians have probably lied to them, and perhaps some more than others. The value of lying as an electoral asset seems to be on the rise. The public education system appears to have not had much success in encouraging the quest for truth. And the common people have been infantilized by their own governments for decades; the state even pretends to protect an individual from himself.
Even if we disregard these caveats, we still need to correct Mencken’s aphorism as follows: “Non-liberal democracy (as we know it) is the theory that the majority of voters think they know what they want and that everybody deserves to get it good and hard.” If the damage caused to institutions protecting individual liberty and prosperity is not irremediable, the result can hopefully serve as a bitter lesson for a better future.
